


there's no end to this road (but it's alright)

by friendly_ficus



Series: small jobs [1]
Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/F, Feelings Realization, Pre-Relationship, extreme amounts of violence are alluded to but this is just T for language honestly, pretty much fluff as far as the wasteland goes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:20:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26456308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: The Wrangler’s hardly the mostauspiciousplace—junkies stumble in and out and the Garrets aren’t ever gonna get that front window fixed—but as the Courier throws back her head and laughs at something Beatrix says, teeth glinting in the shadows, Cass realizes she’s well and truly screwed.Of all the bad luck.
Relationships: Rose of Sharon Cassidy/Female Courier
Series: small jobs [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1979366
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	there's no end to this road (but it's alright)

It’s not that it starts in Nelson. It’s just, of all the shitholes in the Mojave, Nelson’s where Cass starts figuring it out. 

They’ve been traveling together for a little more than six weeks, hiking through the desert and listening to the radio, doing work for the Mojave Express and the few ranchers that’re hanging on out here. The Courier doesn’t seem that motivated to go after the guy with the bad suit, for all that he’s wronged her. She’s much more interested in carrying the next bundle of letters or package of seeds down the road, but they share the caps and salvage, and Cass doesn’t really have any complaints about it. Anything’s better than sitting at the Outpost every damn day.

They’re heading vaguely in the direction of Forlorn Hope, a couple letters for the doctor secreted away somewhere in the Courier’s pack, when the Ranger stops them. He unbends enough to explain the situation after a couple minutes of conversation, and it’s a bad one, just another case of the NCR leaving their soldiers out to dry.

“Yeah, we’re not doing that,” the Courier says, when he asks if she’s a good enough shot to take the hostages out of the equation. “I’m gonna rescue ‘em.”

The Ranger stares. Cass also stares. She’s seen the woman take down geckos and a couple fiends, a mad brahmin once; to hear her talk about walking in on who knows how many legionnaires is.  _ What? _

“Are you crazy? I feel for those soldiers as much as the next guy, but us going down there and getting killed isn’t gonna help much.”

“That’s why  _ we  _ won’t go,” the Courier starts, when Cass interrupts.

“If you think you’re going down into that hellhole alone,” she snarls, steaming mad at the Courier for the idea and the Ranger for starting to look at her with eyes that are more evaluating, “you’ve got another thing coming.”

“I’m quiet,” the other woman says. “I’m  _ really  _ quiet, Cass, and it’ll be safer if I’m on my own; I figure I’ll go in ‘round four in the morning, when they’re tired, and nobody’ll notice a thing.”

“Are you  _ stupid?”  _ The Courier is unmoved. Cass changes her approach. 

“If they catch you they’ll do worse than kill you,” she tries. “You know they will, like at Charlie.”

(One of their first jobs together, wandering south from Novac and looking in on the Ranger station. The holotape the Legion left should probably make Cass shiver. It just got her pissed.)

“They’ll never catch  _ me,”  _ the apparently  _ brainless  _ Courier scoffs. “Have a little faith, Cass.”

And the useless Ranger agrees, perfectly happy for an innocent woman to go down there and get herself killed for nothing, so long as it gets him out of this bind. Oh he talks a big game about ‘doing the NCR a real service’ and ‘not looking for more trouble than you can handle,’ but it’s crap, because if he meant it he’d send the Courier right on her way with her letters, maybe with a note for reinforcements from Forlorn Hope.

By the time four rolls around, the moon a sliver in the sky, Cass’s drunk a toast or two in the Courier’s memory while the woman sits beside her, checking over her weapons. 

“If they catch me,” she starts, getting ready to creep out of the makeshift camp, “I know you’ll—”

“Get the fuck out of here,” Cass growls. “When you come back, we’ll talk about you not doing this again. You shouldn’t make promises this big, or this stupid. I’m not in the market of losing my partners—at least, I’d like to get  _ out  _ of that market.”

The Courier grins, teeth catching the lantern light, and Cass realizes it’s the first time she’s called them partners. What a sap. She shakes her head, takes another drink, and when she looks up it’s to an empty tent.

The first boy staggers out of Nelson at five-thirty, hands not working and legs almost useless. Ranger Milo gets ahold of him before the medic does, before Cass can, and the kid is near-senseless.

“Amazing,” he babbles, while the Ranger’s sticking him with a stimpak. “She was... she was amazing. Quiet like death, loud like angels are.”

What the hell  _ that  _ means, Cass isn’t sure, but religious types’ll say all sorts of things when they’re messed up like this. The poor kid.

The second one makes it to them ten minutes later, just as unsteady, and he can’t say a damn thing. Just shakes his head, squinting his eyes against the lantern.

The third one comes walking up the road at dawn, arm slung over the Courier. 

She’s bloody all over, it’s crusting in her hair and splashed on her boots, and she doesn’t quite stumble under his weight until the medic’s getting the soldier laid down. 

“How many Legion left down there?” the Ranger asks her, ready to move his people in.

She looks at him, first rays of the sun glinting off the new machete at her side, and Cass is at that spot between drunk and sober where metaphors seem like the thing to do. The Courier’s the sun itself, bright and white hot, grin gleaming when she tells him, “Not a damn one.”

“What’d I tell you?” she asks Cass later, when they’re walking north again. 

Cass shakes her head, can’t quite hide the answering smile. 

“I won’t put you back in the business of losing partners,” the Courier promises, and fuck if Cass doesn’t believe her.

\---

The Courier has twitchy hands. She needs to have something in her grip, fiddles with things all the time. Turns the knob on her Pip-Boy, constantly checks the magazine of her gun, that sort of thing. Cass has known people with stranger habits, and the fidgeting comes in handy when they come across locked doors. The Courier’s hands dance when she’s picking open locks, when she’s hacking terminals.

Cass catches herself watching them, sometimes, while they’re trudging through the desert. The Courier’s hands, that is. Just to see that she’s moving them alright, that she didn’t break a finger punching the last enemy that got too close for her rifle. Just to make sure she doesn’t need a splint or a stimpak.

The machete she got off the legionnaire in Nelson gleams at her side, the metal catching the sun, and Cass never sees her use it. She says she’d rather be far away.

But they run into one of the Nelson hostages at Bitter Springs, working guard duty for the doctor there, and he goes about four shades paler when he sees her with it.

“She was like a, I don’t know,” he tells Cass, lingering outside the medical tent, “did you ever hear about tornadoes?”

“Those big dust devils back East, right?”

“Yeah. My Mama always told me they could take buildings down without flinching.” He watches the Courier pass a book over to the doctor, something between awe and fear on his face.

“What’s this got to do with her, huh?” Cass makes a mental note to stick close by her partner for the rest of their time here, just in case.

“When she came outta the barracks at Nelson,” he says, “with that big knife, she made me believe in them.”

When the Courier comes out of the tent to collect Cass, he salutes. Confused, she returns it. Her fingers twitch.

Cass thinks about the way she staggered out of Nelson, a soldier leaning on her, covered in blood. Cass thinks about the gleam of the sun in her teeth, the way she wasn’t hurt at all. Thinks about hands and violence and, oddly, the way she’d looked in the Goodsprings graveyard, when they’d wandered out there looking for broc flowers.

She tries to tie the things together, the Courier’s dancing hands and a tornado, the grave and the woman daring her to leave her own stool at the Mojave Outpost. It’s not as difficult as she thought it’d be.

No, the Courier’s hands are never still, but that night Cass dreams of them lying in the dirt, dreams of the light of the moon playing against the scar on the Courier’s skull, blood seeping out of her head into the shallow grave. Dreams of gunsmoke and the kind of anger that she normally only finds at the bottom of a bottle. 

“Y’alright?” the Courier asks, sleepy voice drawing Cass out of the dream, and she nods.

“Why aren’t we going to Vegas?” she asks, and the Courier is quiet for so long that Cass starts thinking she’s gone back to sleep.

“It feels like once I get there,” she murmurs, “it’ll never be... like this, again. Like once I see him I’ll stop being whoever I am now, and go back to being on my knees in a graveyard.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, it’s stupid,” she sighs. “But I like being like I am, I like being with you.”

A beat. The Courier coughs suddenly, a sputtering sound. 

“I mean—I mean I like doing the small jobs,” she says, and Cass can hear her pick something up and start fiddling with it, the edge of a blanket maybe. “That’s all I mean by it, Cass. I know you’re not, um.”

“I don’t mind the small jobs,” Cass finds herself saying. “I think we’ve got a good thing going.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

\---

The Courier makes a point to get them up to Freeside for a couple days every couple weeks, to stay involved with the community or something. She’s got some kind of deal with the Kings, enough that they can get water without paying, which makes her more of a player than the jobs she takes have ever indicated. The two of them spent the last six hours poking around piles of rubble and running local deliveries for the Followers, baking under the Mojave sun. That’s the kind of work they do in Freeside, nothing jobs for almost no pay.

The Courier threw Francine a sack of caps when they got in from the heat with a wink, told her to get Cass whatever she wanted, before heading to the cage in the back and getting a pile of chips. Blackjack’s her game, Cass knows. Everybody’s got a vice out here, and if gambling suits her, it suits Cass just fine. Not that exciting, but whatever.

Cass keeps an ear out for her, listens to her lose a hundred and fifty caps while finishing her first drink. The Courier’s got shit luck, is the funny thing, probably used it all up surviving getting shot. She quits the table to much laughter, takes a spot a couple seats down from Cass at the end of the bar; it doesn’t take long for Beatrix to slide up next to her and start talking.

Cass drinks, but the burn in her gut isn’t from the liquor. 

The Wrangler’s hardly the most  _ auspicious  _ place—junkies stumble in and out and the Garrets aren’t ever gonna get that front window fixed—but as the Courier throws back her head and laughs at something Beatrix says, teeth glinting in the shadows, Cass realizes she’s well and truly fucked. Of all the bad luck.

She wants, she wants—look. She’s spent a couple hazy nights with women over the years, liked them just fine, but she’s not about to torpedo the whole thing they’ve got going. And bringing your partner to bed has a way of doing that, even if your partner’s the kind who can lose six hands of cards and laugh after, instead of going for a gun.

Francine makes a sympathetic noise, sets another whiskey on the bar. Cass rolls her eyes, shoves the empty bottle away and grabs the new one. Fucking Freeside.

Beatrix’s hand is on the Courier’s shoulder, now, ruined thumb at the junction of her neck. Cass watches that thumb press, just a little, watches the flush blooming in the Courier’s cheeks. Fuck. Right. No taking your partner to bed, no getting in the way of her getting hers. Cass isn’t an  _ asshole.  _

The bottle in her hands is empty. She squints at it, sets it down a little too hard. The  _ thunk  _ of the glass isn’t that loud, but apparently it’s enough to get the Courier’s attention. She untangles herself from Beatrix with an apologetic smile, and between one blink and the next she’s beside Cass.

“You alright?” she asks, fingers twitching the way they do when she wants a weapon in her hands. Cass doesn’t think about knowing her that well, what it means to have noticed that kind of detail.

“Fine.”

“I’ve got a room, if you’re... I know it was a long day. Hot as the devil out there, too.” She’s frowning now, a couple sentences from doing something drastic like putting her hand on Cass’ forehead. She’s always doing stuff like that, checking people over after fights even though she’s not much of a doctor. Maybe hanging around the Followers so much let her pick up a couple things. Maybe she just needs something to do with her hands; they’re drumming against the bar now, inaudible under the sound of people talking.

“Sure was.” The empty bottle’s still there, sitting on the bar. Francine’s off somewhere in the back, or taking a smoke break, or she saw the Courier coming and left Cass to suffer her concern.

“Just not like you to be so quiet, that’s all,” she says, and the usual rush of anger at somebody prying into her business doesn’t come. Yeah, she’s really up shit creek this time.

“Just tired,” Cass lies, and the Courier nods.

And then they’re walking up the stairs, her arm slung over the Courier’s shoulders, her head drooping like some kind of lightweight. But she’s a little dizzy with revelation, with the Courier’s closeness, with the heat of the day. Cass collapses onto the bed, face buried in the dusty pillow, and before she’s out she feels the Courier take off her hat, smooth the back of her hair.

Cass wakes up sometime after sundown, to two bottles of purified water on the nightstand and a cheery note ordering her to  _ drink these! went and asked julie - she said drink water! _

It’s signed with a little smiley face. Cass groans. 

(And if she keeps the note, folded up in one of her pockets, that’s her business.)

**Author's Note:**

> title of this fic is a pull from the song "Reno" by Wild Child, yes i am a song lyric title person  
> bringing myself full circle with this; i used to write really terrible f:nv fic in the ff dot net days, now i'm writing hopefully better f:nv fic here. returning to new vegas in These Uncertain Times made me want to write some stuff for my current courier, and i just think cass should be her girlfriend. maybe more to come with this? not sure yet! but i sure do love these characters  
> hope this was a fun read, i know not a lot really happened! leave a comment and let me know what you think! :)


End file.
